by L. A. Cruz
She opened her mouth to say that all that sex talk was only joking. She knew better than to compromise—
But then the ceiling banged. Bang, bang, bang, as the new creature fell from the open grave above and ricocheted through the chute.
She jerked her hand away and braced herself for entry.
Chapter 26
The new arrival fell from the chute in the ceiling and hit the floor. There was a wet thud and splash of saliva and blood, like a water balloon had been dropped from the roof. The smack of the impact rippled through the creature’s body and it twitched and shuddered on the tiles as if it were a squirrel that had missed its jump between the branches and landed on the ground, momentarily stunned.
The thing was clad in all black: A black T-shirt. Black trousers. Black kneepads even. It looked like an umpire.
“I think one got loose at baseball game,” Dunning said. “And didn’t like the call.”
Through her fogged visor, through the plate glass window, double-blurred, Helia glimpsed the thing she was about to wrestle into submission. It stirred, rolled off its back, went to all fours, and then crabbed to the far corner.
“What an ugly sucker,” Dunning said. He pointed to the hand truck leaning on the wall. “What do you want? Top or bottom?”
“I’m all about the top.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Dunning said.
“In this case, which is easier?”
Dunning shrugged, needed to hunch his shoulders to make it read in the suit. “Maybe the hand truck?”
“Then I’ll do the wrangle.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes,” Helia said. She grinned and flexed a bicep in the suit. Thanks to the puffy pleats, they were the biggest guns she’d ever had. “The road not taken, right? Whatever doesn’t kill me, makes me buffer.”
“Hoo-rah, Corporal,” Dunning said. He tapped the radio control button on the side of his helmet and static rumbled over the tiny speakers inside both their helmets.
“This is Sergeant Dunning. We need an unlock on the arrival chamber. Fifteen seconds.”
“Roger that,” the control room said.
Helia watched the crack between the steel door and the frame. When the deadbolt retreated, Dunning yanked open the door, jumped inside, and grabbed the hand truck to use as a shield.
“Go, go, go!”
As fast as she could move in the cumbersome suit, Helia jumped inside. It would have been faster to roll. She slammed the door behind her and began the countdown in her head. A precise fifteen seconds. She spun to face the crouching creature, a great effort in the spaceman suit, that strained her obliques.
“When it comes at you, duck,” Dunning said. “Let it roll over you and get it from behind. You can't take it face on.”
Right as she hit the number fifteen, the deadbolt locked behind her and they were trapped in the room with the thing.
It snarled. She had barely raised her arms in defense when it raised its head, pushed off the wall, and sprang at them.
“Duck!” Dunning said.
But Helia was frozen.
She was staring it right in the face. It was midair, its skin slightly dark and flapping off its cheekbones as if it were in a wind tunnel. Deep blue veins pulsed in its temples and its eyes were wide, droopy, and frightened.
Images flashed across her visor, as if projected from the back of her helmet. She was standing over a bassinet and seeing the boy’s large, translucent temples for the first time. She was sitting on the porch and spelling the word S N A K E as she pointed to the moving cattails. She was sitting in the high school stadium as the principal mispronounced the surname Crucian and the audience snickered. She stood to shout them down as the short young man with baby cheeks and skin darker than hers, proudly climbed the steps, shook the principal's hand, and took his diploma.
That same boy was now a foot from her throat.
Chapter 27
“Manny?”
Her little brother slammed into her chest and knocked her over backwards as if she were a large attack dog. Her helmet smacked the concrete and the reverberations rattled her skull and produced and instant headache. Manny pinned her shoulders to the ground and snapped at her neck. Saliva swung from his canines. They had not been sharpened, but gleamed yellow under the fluorescent light.
“Jesus!” Dunning said. “Get out of there. Roll! Push it off!”
But Helia did not struggle. She just lay there looking into her brother’s blackened eyes. There was no recognition there. He chomped at her visor, his face pressed to the curved shield so hard, his nose broke to the side and spilled blood. It was warm on the neoprene sleeve around her neck.
“What’s the matter with you?” Dunning said. He pushed the hand truck aside and leapt behind Manny. He hooked a forearm under his chin and yanked him off Helia and dragged him backward.
“Get the hand truck!” he yelled, Manny thrashing in his grasp.
Still, Helia did not move. She was in a complete daze. Was that thing really her brother? He was familiar yet foreign, a stranger she knew so well.
Manny thrashed flailed in Dunning’s bear hug and chomped at his forearm. “Helia! What the hell’s the matter with you? I need your help!”
Helia blinked, but could only see her brother's rotting face pressed against her visor. There was a ringing in her ears as if a rifle had gone off next to her head.
“Get up, Corporal!”
Manny pushed him backward and there was a loud crack as Dunning’s helmet smacked the wall. The impact snapped Helia out of her daze.
“I’m sorry! I’m here!”
She rolled onto her knees and got up and grabbed the hand truck. She wheeled it over and shoved it into her brother’s thrashing body. Manny was now trapped between the truck and Dunning, Dunning up against the wall.
Dunning pushed off the wall and pinned Manny face first against the hand truck. Manny stretched his neck over the cross brace and snapped at Helia’s neck. His arms were free at the sides and he groped for her sleeves.
“Manny,” she whispered.
“Hold him steady,” Dunning said, “I’ll strap him in.” He pressed a stiff arm to Manny’s back, Manny’s sternum compressing against the metal bars on the hand truck, and grabbed the middle leather strap and cinched it tightly around Manny’s back, right under the armpits. Then he grabbed a lower strap and cinched it around his waist. The lowest one, he pulled tight around his calves, so tight it bit into his skin and the trousers dampened.
“Help me with his arms?”
Helia grabbed one of Manny’s flailing wrists. She had arm-wrestled him a lot when they were kids, but now he was stronger than ever, either from the Academy or the transformation, she couldn’t tell, and it took all her strength to pin his arm to the side. Dunning cinched the last strap around his arm, around his back, and did the same with his other arm, completely immobilizing him.
When he was secure, Dunning wiped a sleeve across his visor, more instinct as practical since his sweating forehead was protected by the helmet.
“What’s the hell’s the matter with you?” Dunning said.
Helia could only shake her head. “I don’t know,” she said softly.
Dunning grabbed the dangling mask and pressed it hard against Manny’s face. He yanked the leather strap so tight around the back of his head that it cut into the rotting flesh of his ears.
“You locked up on me, Corporal.”
All Helia could do was stand there and watch her little brother squirm against the hand truck. He didn’t like it, she could tell. He was miserable.
“It wasn’t pretty, but it’s done,” Dunning said. “Let that be a lesson to you, Corporal. There’s no room to freeze up. One bite and we’re dead.”
“Yes, Sergeant,” she said quietly.
Still pissed, Dunning shook his head. “Do better next time. You understand?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
He pressed the button on the side of his hel
met. “The arrival is secure. We need a fifteen-second unlock on the arrival door.”
“Roger that,” the control room said.
The deadbolt slid back and Dunning yanked open the door. Helia didn’t bother to count the seconds.
“This one's all you.”
Helia gripped the handles, her brother twitching under the restraints.
“C’mon. Let’s go.”
She pushed the wheels out first, lowered the hand truck as if she were about to wheel a stack of heavy boxes, and rolled it through the door. Manny shook his head so hard, little chunks of flesh flew into the main chamber.
“I’ll get you out of here,” she whispered.
Her brother jerked his head and tongued the inside of the face mask. There was no recognition, only a miserable column of rotting flesh.
Chapter 28
As she wheeled her brother across the day room, an immense pressure built up inside Helia’s face. It pressed on her eyes and threatened to leak. Her vision blurred so much that she could barely see where she was going.
Thank God for the visor, she thought, or Dunning would see how misty-eyed Manny’s arrival had made her. She usually prided herself on how well she controlled her tears—unlike some girls she knew who were so emotional, their eyes sprang leaks after something as silly as getting a bad grade on a pop quiz.
Helia had watched her father get dragged off to jail so many times that she learned to squeeze back the tears like he did. It was her only way to get back at him. To show him she didn’t care. Her mother had told her that it was okay for girls to cry, that too much saline backed up inside her face would make her cheeks bloat, but Helia didn’t buy it. She believed that men climbed the social ladder faster because they never showed weakness.
The squeaking wheels on the hand truck drew what remained of the creatures off their tailbones, off their spinal cords, off their boney stumps, as if some giant marionette player had suddenly fish-hooked their wretched faces and pulled them up by the strings. Crooked and hobbled, they pressed against the bars and groaned and groped.
Manny kept working his jaw back and forth inside the muzzle of the face mask. As she neared his new, dingy home, Helia realized that deep down, she had always feared that incarceration would be Manny’s ultimate fate—just never under circumstances as dire as these. Ever since she’d been twelve, she had known that Manny was incapable of taking care of himself. The first incident came when he had begged her to ride her bike with him to the local Walmart and she had finally put aside her homework and acquiesced.
At the store, a clerk had spotted the nine-year-old sneaking a pack of baseball cards into his pocket. When the cops arrived, they gave Manny a stern lecture and called home, but when their mother came to the scene of the crime, she had scolded Helia for being the irresponsible one who couldn’t keep her little brother under control. It was Helia’s fault. Never Manny’s. Never little Manny’s. Her mother, blinded by the situation with his father, never held him responsible.
And it had stayed that way throughout high school. Hell, it was a miracle that Manny ever graduated.
With Helia it was always, “Eat your vegetables, do your homework, don’t wear your skirt so short or you look like a hooker.” But with Manny, her mother let everything slide. Manny had only met his father once—a night when Rodney Crane was in the drunk tank—so Helia’s mother thought her only son was so fragile that he needed the white-glove treatment. As a result, she never enforced anything. It fell on Helia’s shoulders to try to discipline her brother, but she had a life of her own and a teenage girl is never a good substitute for a father.
At first, Manny’s decision to join the police academy had shocked Helia, but since leaving for the Salem Penitentiary, the decision had grown to give her hope. Most of the cops she had known were borderline crooks and it took someone who was right on the edge, someone who wanted to scratch that criminal underbelly under the guise of giving it a good uppercut to be a good cop. She came to think that maybe, just maybe, he had finally gotten his life on track.
But all that hope was dashed to shards when Manny fell through the chute. And now here her brother was, tied up in the hand truck, as helpless as a cornered Doberman—and just as vicious.
Dunning was following her. He stayed about four feet behind. Helia didn't know if the microphone was live inside her helmet and she didn't want to risk revealing her feelings, so she kept her lips sealed. Every time she had the instinct to mumble something to herself, she pressed her lips together harder. She was walled off in the helmet, her emotions trapped inside her body, her body trapped inside the heavy suit.
She couldn’t let Dunning know that this new arrival was her brother. And so, as she wheeled him down to cell number twelve, stood the hand truck upright, and stepped back, she pretended it was her own weakness that had caused the hesitation.
She was a terrible liar and kept her eyes averted. “I’m sorry I froze. It won’t happen again.”
Dunning clicked his tongue. His microphone was live and she could hear it. “Apology accepted. I shouldn’t have snapped at you back there. It's your first time, I know. This is a learning opportunity. It's not as if any of this shit is normal,” he said and held out his hand. “Truce?”
Helia wanted to wipe her eyes, but couldn’t do it in the suit. He was being a typical man. Never an apology. The only way to smooth it over was to be the one to admit guilt.
She shook his hand. There was hardly any feeling through the gloves. “You were right. I let you down. I should have handled it. Let me make up for it by doing this part by myself.”
“No, Corporal. I can't let you do that. We’re in this together.”
“I can do it,” Helia said. “Please, I need to do this. I need to get over my fear. I don’t want to freeze up again. Not ever.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Dunning exhaled, his breath rumbling over the microphone. “Okay then. I’ll be standing right out here. I’m gonna give you twenty-five seconds and then I’m coming in, got it? Twenty-five seconds. That’s all.”
Helia nodded. Twenty-five seconds. She could do it.
Dunning thumbed his helmet. “We need a fifteen-second unlock on cell twelve. After twenty-five seconds, unlock it for another fifteen.”
“Roger that,” the control room said.
Helia gripped both handles as hard as if she were about to fire a pistol for the first time. Overhead, the buzz traveled down the cellblock, down the wall, and then the deadbolt yanked back with a loud clunk.
Dunning grabbed the bars and slid the door open and Helia pushed her brother inside. Immediately, the counting started in her head. When she hit the fifteen-second mark, the deadbolt reengaged. She was now locked in the room with what remained of her brother.
She worked to undo the middle straps first, leaving both his ankles and his shoulders bound.
“Dunning, can you hear me?”
He stood there, but didn’t respond. Her mic must have been off.
“Let’s do it in the shower.”
He didn’t respond. If that didn’t get his attention, then the helmet must certainly not have been transmitting. It must have been safe.
The countdown kept running in her head. In twenty seconds, the deadbolt would disengage again. She knelt and unstrapped Manny’s ankles and then stood and pressed the visor to his shaking head.
“Manny, can you hear me? Manny,” she whispered. “Do you remember me? It’s Helia.”
For a moment, Manny stopped thrashing. His eyes shifted toward her.
He was still cognizant. He still had some brains left.
One of the tears that had been growing, gaining strength like a rolling snowball, leaked out the side of her eye and ran down her cheek.
“Hang in there,” she whispered. “I will help you out of this. I promise.”
She unstrapped the muzzle from the back of his head and his jaw dropped open wide enough to fit an entire fist inside his mou
th. In the dim light, she saw how ragged his gums had become. They were nothing but strips of hanging pink.
He convulsed and tried to get free, the last restraint ripping into his shoulders. She stepped around the side of the hand truck and wrapped an arm around him and pressed her body into his back. Even through the heavy padding, she could feel the bumps of his spinal cord. She thought of them wrestling when they were little. It was during a sleepover. They had gotten into a fight when Manny had bitten the head off one of her G.I. Joes. A couple of her girlfriends had joined in, friends of hers from middle school, bad girls, mean girls. They laughed and pushed her aside and thought it would be funny to hold him down with a pillow and pretend to hump him on the basement floor. Helia had just stood along the back wall and watched as they put that pillow between their crotches and took turns humping him. She never should have let that happen.
“I’m going to get you out of here, Manny,” she said, the hard plastic of her visor smushing his ear. “No matter what it takes.”
Ten seconds to go. She slipped a hand between her chest and his back and deftly unhooked the last restraint and then yanked it loose. Manny was free now, the only thing pinning him to the hand truck was her own body.
Five seconds to go.
Using her legs, she pushed back, launching herself off Manny hard enough that the hand truck fell to the ground. The handles hit first and Manny’s body jolted. She staggered backward and at the same second the dead bolt unlocked, Dunning yanked the bars open and she stumbled out of the cell.
Dunning slammed the door shut and the deadbolt rang home.
“Interesting technique,” Dunning said.
“Thank you,” Helia said. She watched her brother crab toward the darkest corner of the cell. He put a ragged forearm up to his face and shielded his eyes from the dim light.
“One problem though. We can’t leave that hand truck in there. Of course. The Colonel won't like it one bit,” Dunning said. “It could be used as a weapon against us. So we need to go back in.”
